A Contrastive analysis of specific rhetorical relations in english and Turkish expository paragraph writing

Abstract

SUMMARY This study aimed to examine the logical organization developed in the expository paragraph writing in Turkish and English of Turkish- speaking university students. The main purpose of conducting such an empirical study was to test the validity of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis which claims that different languages use different rhetorical patterns in the organization and expression of ideas resulting in the rhetorical interference from LI to L2 writing. Chapter II presents a brief outline of the development of rhetoric as an art in a historical perspective to provide some background knowledge for the theory of contrastive rhetoric and also for the composition instruction. Chapter III discusses the theoretical framework underlying the notion of contrastive rhetoric and gives a critical review of studies both supporting and rejecting the concept of contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. Chapter IV describes the method of research, the procedures employed in collecting the necessary data, and the method of analysis carried out on the data base. Chapter V presents the results of the data analysis and discusses the implications of findings which revealed that both the English-major and non-English major subjects tended to emphasize coordination in the logical organization of the Turkish paragraphs on the topics assigned. The English-major group, on the other hand, used more subordination than coordination in their English paragraphs. The comparative performance of the two subject groups in developing the logical relations in the organization of the Turkish paragraphs indicated that non-English majors employed more coordination in their Turkish paragraphs than their English-major counterparts did in the same corpus. The tendency of the two subject groups to emphasize coordination in the Turkish corpus allowed to assume that coordination seems to be a favored rhetoricaldevice employed at the levels of modification in the organization of the Turkish expository paragraphs. Chapter VI deals with the conclusions that can be drawn from the present study as a whole and evaluates the validity of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. The evidence obtained from this research leads to conclude that a weak version of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis has some validity in the sense that different languages have different preferences in the rhetorical organization of written texts, at least as far as the expository mode of writing is concerned. However, the original version of the hypothesis which claimed a serious rhetorical interference from LI to L2 writing is rejected at the levels of modification in the organization of the sample texts analyzed in this study.